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Shuttle Reentry Over the Continental US
TheOtherChimeraTwin notes that the shuttle Discovery will land at Kennedy Space Center on Monday morning at 8:48 EDT. The craft will make a rare "descending node" overflight of the continental US en route to landing in Florida. Here are maps of the shuttle's path if is lands on orbit 222 as planned, or on the next orbit. Spaceweather.com says: "...it takes the shuttle about 35 minutes to traverse the path shown... Observers in the northwestern USA will see the shuttle shortly after 5 am PDT blazing like a meteoric fireball through the dawn sky. As Discovery makes its way east, it will enter daylight and fade into the bright blue background. If you can't see the shuttle, however, you might be able to hear it. The shuttle produces a sonic double-boom that reaches the ground about a minute and a half after passing overhead."
Watch the touch down too! I rewrote the nose wheel steering GN&C module in '89 and the stuff that makes landings "perfect" in '91. They were blowing tires with rough landings. Since then, the touch downs are PERFECT and smooooooooooth.
Hi JV, KM, DC, BW, AR, LP, SM, JY, PP, and the rest of the old GN&C team!
At first I thought those were March X and was going to congratulate NASA on conquering time travel.
I'm not sure minimizing drag is the goal when you start your landing approach at Mach 22.
Drag is a good thing on reentry, where you are slowing down as fast as the heat shield will let you. The shuttle acts a glider only for the very last part, and hence doesn't need to be a very good one. It may look like a plane but it really spends more time acting like a rocket.
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What should I look for, about 500 miles straight-line distance along the path from the runway?
Last time I had this chance, I think I saw a plane cross the sky, but it seemed too slow.
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You know what else has really bad aerodynamics and catches all kinds of drag in the atmosphere? Meteorites.
And your mama.
1. Well, during re-entry it's not entering nose-first, but belly-first, so the wings basically like air brakes more than like wings. I'm not sure if making it more aerodynamic for flight like an aircraft would actually be an impediment there. It would still have the aerodynamics of a parachute when re-entering belly-first anyway.
2. Well, "glide" is technically accurate, but maybe painting a slightly wrong image for the layman. That thing is losing altitude (falling) at 50m/s (about 110mph or 180 km/h) even in its best glide phase. And it's glide-to-drag ratio is more comparable to a parachute, and I don't mean paraglider, than to an aircraft even at touchdown, during earlier phases let's just say it's got about half as much lift/drag as a squirrel ;)
The angle of descent at touchdown is actually 20 degrees, which doesn't sound like too steep, but it's about 7 times steeper than a commercial airliner landing. By comparison to just about any fixed wing aircraft, it's not akin landing an anvil or the proverbial lead duck ;)
Not saying it's a bad thing, since it does have a _lot_ of altitude and speed to shed, and it's obviously doing a good job at thazt. More like just saying, for the benefit of whoever needs that kind of clarification, that it never actually acts that much like a normal glider, not even on the very last part. Or at least not like a glider you'd want to pilot for fun. All it can do is fall, and quite rapidly at that, just in a more controlled manner. It's a shape to do just one thing: fall down from 340,000m or so (about a million feet) to the ground without going *SPLAT* on touchdown. While techically there is some gliding involved, I think the best description of its role for the layman is more like "rigid parachute" than "glider."
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